Observe what is necessary to bring a minimum of coherence to the argument: an equivocation between "the public primarily" -- the private citizens who work for or patronize these private institutions -- and "the public rules" -- the dictates that government wants to force upon these private parties. The bill "restores the separation of church and state in the insurance market" only in the sense that when the "State" invades that market, the "Church" must go -- state imperialism in practice. Observe also the real motive: the dubious insulation of employees from what Leftism labels the "economic power" of employers. In practical terms, prospective employees who don't like the benefits package offered by a religious employer will flock to his secular competitors -- something that millions of people do every day. (Conversely, there are many religious "customers and employees" who very much want a company that reflects their values -- something that "progressives" have no problem understanding when it involves their values.) Finally, observe the fundamental principle: Socialist imperatives supersede civil liberties -- déjà vu encore une fois.

Even the economic inequality of the market substantiates the moral superiority of the Left, since the latter is the singular good that will vanquish the evil of the former. "Greed," like rape and racism, is judged yet another evil spreading throughout society. And the greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the need for the good of the socialist elite. "What you need," reveals Catharine MacKinnon, "is people who see through literature [!] like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised women's visual vocabulary." While the Left condemns the free market for a division of labor based on ability and the alleged concoction of "false needs," its own politics centers on the dire need of the endarkened masses for axiological experts. …

And like all aspects of the Left, it traces back to the same source -- Marx: "[While] its heart is the proletariat," the "head of the emancipation is philosophy," i.e., the theory class of the socialist elite. So much for the endless ruminating as to why "the workers' struggle" so engages intellectuals. In time, that "heart" has come to be identified with the Third World, minorities, women, the environment, but in every incarnation it remains an organ to be controlled by that "head," an epistemological and ethical hierarchy who will rule as philosopher-tyrants. The Republic of Marx (to paraphrase Bakunin)

will not content itself with administering and governing the masses economically. It will also administer the masses culturally, concentrating in the hands of the State the formation of character, the development and spread of ideas, the standardization of language, the control of literature and the arts, the content of education, and finally the codification of the duties of each citizen to the only moral authority -- the State. All that will demand an immense virtue and many heads overflowing with "good intentions" in this government. It will be the reign of ideological virtue, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit humanists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of the Good, and an immense evil majority. And then, woe unto the mass of evil ones!

The Communist state -- even as the embryonic project of the League of the Just, whose proclamation was penned by Marx and Engels -- was never anything so much as an Inquisition launched against, not a handful of heretics, but the whole populace, for whom freedom would be only the freedom to do evil.